Mangalitsa pigs are prized for their taste and marbled meat.

By MICHAEL S. SANDERS


EMOD ISTVANMAJOR, Hungary - Like style on the runway, style for pigs is changeable. With their abundant fat, the curly-haired Mangalitsa pigs of Hungary were all the rage a century ago. But as time went on, they were forgotten.

Now that succulent pork is back in fashion, the Mangalitsa - saved from near extinction on a farm here at the edge of Hungary’s bleak and barren Great Plain - are making a comeback.

Most of those raised here become ham and other cured meats in Spain. But Mangalitsas are also being raised at farms in the United States for chefs who pay as much as 40 percent more for them than for Berkshires, another elite breed.

In early April, April Bloomfield at the Spotted Pig in Manhattan served the belly and trotters of a Mangalitsa/ Berkshire crossbreed with Agen prunes for $32. (She hopes to have more later in the month.)

“When I tasted this pig,”Ms. Bloomfield said of the Mangalitsa,“it took me back to my grandmother’s kitchen on a Sunday afternoon, windows steaming from the roasting pork in the oven. Back then pork tasted as it should: like a pig. This pork has that same authentic taste.”

Devin Knell, executive sous-chef at the renowned French Laundry restaurant in California, confits the belly of the Mangalitsa (pronounced MAHNga- leet-za); roasts the liver, kidneys, and chops, and poaches the saddle sous vide with a garlic mousse.

Unlike workaday pork, Mr. Knell said, Mangalitsa is marbled, and the fat dissolves on your tongue - it’s softer and creamier, akin to Wagyu beef.

George Faison, an owner of the New York City specialty meats company DeBragga and Spitler, will start selling chefs pork from Mangalitsas fattened on the West Coast this summer. He said the fat was luscious, more like that of duck than pork. Recalling a tasting for chefs last fall, he said,“The belly meat was unctuous, but it was the loin meat that really impressed me.

Mangalitsas were bred for their lard on the Hungarian farms of Archduke Joseph in the 1830s. Herds shrank with the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after World War I and declined further with the introduction of fast-growing white pigs and cheaper, higher quality vegetable oils after World War II.

But Peter Toth, a Hungarian animal geneticist, did not want this Hapsburg legacy to be lost. He has worked to save the pigs here on a farm with buildings of whitewashed stone. Dimly lighted wooden pens filled with straw shelter piglets and nursing sows.

Their feed is a mix of barley, wheat, wheat bran, alfalfa and sunflower seeds, but unlike the feed on factory farms, little corn and nothing with soy.

“When Communism collapsed, Mr. Toth said,“the state farms that served as the last gene banks also collapsed. It was a total anarchy in the country. When I started to save Mangalitsas, to search for them in 1991, I found only 198 purebred pigs in the country. Sometimes, I would rescue the pigs right from the slaughterhouse.

Today his company, Olmos and Toth, in addition to maintaining breeding stock, fattens some 8,000 pigs and oversees the production of 12,000 more on farms in the surrounding regions.

Mr. Toth’s partner, Juan Vicente Olmos Llorente, who runs Monte Nevado in Spain, takes every Mangalitsa ham, loin and shoulder produced on the farms. In Spain, the hams are finished and sold as jamon Mangalica, the most expensive going for $154 a kilogram. Monte Nevado hopes to begin Internet sales in the United States in June at latienda.com.

Mangalitsas may be too expensive for most local bistros, but Mr. Faison, the specialty meat wholesaler, said there should be a place for them.“We tell the chefs, you got to keep some magic on the menu, some fun, he said,“because the people are coming in to escape whatever hell they’re facing out there.